Golub’s big ambitions for PaaS go beyond multiple language support, according to his blog post announcing the move. Developers also want to use multiple stacks, he wrote, and to deploy apps on any hardware.

He continued:

“Operators both inside and outside of the enterprise want to be able to run applications seamlessly. Almost every enterprise wants its own PaaS-like environment. In other words, the industry seems to want not just a multi-language PaaS, but a limitless-language, multi-environment, and multi-enterprise PaaS.”

San Francisco-based dotCloud is the commercial force behind the open-source Docker.io community, which aims to build portable containers out of applications. The goal is to provide an application built on a laptop that can then run in large-scale implementations, on virtual machines, OpenStack clusters, and public clouds, according to the Docker.io web site.

In a statement, dotCloud founder and CTO Solomon Hykes said he got to know Golub when the two worked together on the Docker project. “Ben shares our passion for transforming the industry through open source,” Hykes said.

Hykes founded dotCloud in 2008, and it launched in March 2011 with $10.8 million in Series A and seed funding from Benchmark, Trinity Ventures, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Y Combinator and angel investor Ron Conway. It has not raised additional venture capital since then. The company won GigaOM’s inaugural Structure Launchpad competition in June 2011.

]]>If you’re anything like me, you probably have several email address books, each with a daunting number of duplicate, conflicting and junk entries. Scrubly is a web app that can help to clean them up. It’s compatible with Gmail and Google Apps, Outlook and Apple Mail address books, and can scan contact folders and groups for duplicate contact entries, flagging them for review. You can remove duplicates with a click, or choose to selectively review and delete flagged entries individually.

Address books are automatically backed up before cleaning them, so original files can be retrieved and restored at any time (reassuring if you’re concerned the de-duplication process may accidentally remove some entries you don’t intend it to).

It can automatically update Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail address books after cleaning them up (Plaxo can also do this, but only if you pay for its Premium Sync service)

It’s easy to use: Just sign up, then either authorize the Scrubly app to connect to your Gmail/Google Apps accounts and/or download the clients for Outlook or Apple Mail. You can set up multiple address books in your Scrubly account; each one is scrubbed and backed up separately. When you hit the “scrub” button on an address book, Scrubly scans it, looking for duplicates, junk entries (those that contain very limited information, such as only a name) and “loose match” duplicates (entries that Scrubly thinks are probably duplicates but they aren’t exact matches; you need to review these individually). Once you’re happy with the results, you can re-import the scrubbed address book (or books) back into your email app (or apps).

If you have fewer than 250 contacts to clean up, Scrubly is free. More than that, and you can either opt for a one-time cleaning of address books with an unlimited number of contacts for $9.95 or buy an annual subscription, which costs $24.95. It worked pretty well in my testing, successfully de-duping both Gmail and Outlook address books. However, note that Scrubly only has de-duping tools; it doesn’t attempt to automatically keep your address books up-to-date like Plaxo’s Personal Assistant does, and it can’t connect with the variety of services Plaxo can, either. If you have a mass of contacts spread across various different email and social media accounts, and want to de-duplicate entries across all of them, Plaxo’s pricier service (which costs $79.95 per year) may be more useful. But if you’re simply looking for a way to clean duplicates from a particularly messy address book, Scrubly offers a simple and cost-effective solution, particularly as you can opt to pay for a one-time cleaning.

]]>Plaxo was one of the first companies to offer a unified online address book that connected to and synchronized with all the different address books people use to store contact info: email clients, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. More recently, however, many innovative “social CRM” competitors have moved into the address book space, like Gist, Connected and Soocial, while Plaxo tinkered with a social networking product called Pulse. The company has announced that it’s refocusing on its address book product, and has released the Plaxo Personal Assistant, a new service that intelligently makes automatic updates to the Plaxo address book to keep contact information relevant and current.

That all sounds pretty useful, but the new service is not particularly cheap: it costs an additional $79.95 per year (the basic Plaxo service itself is free). You should also note that in order for the Personal Assistant to work its magic, it will need process your contact data, which may make some folks uncomfortable; you can view Plaxo’s data usage policy here.

]]>Yesterday, Om reported that Etacts is to be shut down. While that’s bad news for users of the social CRM service, fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives available. While none of them provides an exact like-for-like replacement for Etacts, here is a selection of the more useful social CRM tools that have been reviewed by the WWD team:

Gistis an online service that “connects your inbox to the web,” automatically building a profile for each of your contacts from the data that’s available in your inbox and via their social networking profiles. Like Etacts, it will also remind users if they haven’t been in touch with an important contact for a while. It’s available as a Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, and also as iPhone and Android apps, and can work with Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The service is currently free. See Scott’s review of Gist here.

Rapportiveuses social data (pulled from the controversial Rapleaf service) to provide additional information about your contacts. It replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc) and works via a Firefox add-on or Chrome extension. As the information is taken from the Rapleaf database, the results are sometimes hit-and-miss, depending on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie a particular contact’s email address to various social media accounts. Rapportive is free. See my review of Rapportive here.

Plaxois an online address book that can store contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Like Etacts, it’s “socially aware,” tracking social feeds from Twitter and Facebook to keep users up-to-date on their contacts. The basic Plaxo service is free; Plaxo Premium adds sync with Outlook Contacts, Google Contacts and Windows Mobile and some additional features and costs $36.95 per year. See Judi’s review of Plaxo v.3 here.

MailBrowser. Webyog’s MailBrowser is another CRM app that works with Gmail to provide additional data about your contacts, and can automatically keep contact information up-to-date by pulling data from emails. However, it doesn’t provide easy access to social network profiles or updates. Unlike some of the other services here, MailBrowser is a locally installed app, so it may be a better choice for users with privacy concerns. MailBrowser is free, and is available as an IE plugin, Firefox add-on and Chrome extension. See my review of MailBrowser here.

Xobniis a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that provides a sidebar offering additional information about your contacts culled from their social network profiles and emails. It can automatically extract information like phone numbers from email messages, and also provides a threaded conversation view and easier ways to find attachments. The basic Xobni product is free, while Xobni Plus costs $30 and adds advanced search features, auto suggest, support for more than one PST file and more. See Scott’s hands-on review of Xobni here.

]]>The folks at Ribbit Mobile have taken Google Voice‘s “one number for life” concept and expanded upon it. The service is still in beta, but it already offers many sophisticated features that allow users to:

Route phone calls to smartphones and other locations. One can set up Ribbit to ring multiple landline and cell numbers, as well as Skype. It can also be set to send SMS alerts with notifications of missed calls and transcribed messages.

When an incoming call arrives, be presented with what Ribbit calls “Caller ID 2.0,” showing the Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr statuses of the caller.

Transfer calls.

Receive recorded and/or transcribed messages. Ribbit Mobile offers a choice of vendors, so one can select computer-generated or human-produced transcriptions.

Archive and search messages.

Take notes during conversations and attach them to the record of the call.

Dictate memos.

Specify what caller ID will be displayed with outgoing calls.

Ribbit Mobile offers several ways to interact with its service, including an iPhone app, plus web-based and AIR widgets for messages, conferencing, dialing and SMS.

With all of these features, I really wanted to like Ribbit Mobile. Unfortunately, at this point, it has some major shortcomings:

Slow interface speed. The web interface is Flash-based, and seems to be very slow to load. I counted the load time (on my Mac, using Firefox 3.5) at over 90 seconds!

Poor contact management. Existing contacts can be imported through Plaxo. Plaxo has its own problems, which I won’t go into here, but Plaxo imports are extremely slow (20 minutes for about 1,400 contacts), and the imported contact file does not include the social network information that’s central to the “Caller ID 2.0″ idea. You can go through each contact in Ribbit and add the social network info, but Ribbit deletes all of your current contacts if you re-import from Plaxo, which means that any social network links you add will disappear next time you import an updated Plaxo file. Also, since Ribbit offers no way to export its contact list, you’ll be forced to maintain two separate address lists if you don’t want to be tied to Ribbit.

Inconsistent linking to social networks. The connections to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter seem to require frequent re-linking.

Limited community interaction. Surprisingly, one must get approval to even view the forums. Not surprisingly, there aren’t many forum posts, which doesn’t strike me as a good sign.

During the beta period, Ribbit Mobile is free, and U.S. and UK residents can request beta invitations. After the beta period ends, Ribbit anticipates that the service will be sold for $10-$30 per month.

Ribbit Mobile has potential, but right now, its slowness and limited contact management mean that it’s not yet ready for daily use. Ribbit was acquired by telecoms firm BT in 2008, so let’s hope that it gets its act together.

]]>Ben Golub, the long-time CEO of Plaxo who oversaw the social networker’s sale to Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) two years ago, is leaving the company. Golub joined Plaxo in 2005 and says in a blog post that his “passion is in building new companies” and that he’s therefore leaving “to start working on my next company,” although he does not describe it. He is being replaced by Justin Miller, the former GM of Plaxo.com. Plaxo’s service lets users manage their online address books and also see what their contacts are doing on the web. Under Comcast, Plaxo has also been working to bring “social capabilities” to Comcast services.

]]>Plaxo, the contact synchronization service that we’ve covered previously, has released a much-improved version of its address book, the bread and butter of the app. The first thing you’ll notice is the speed. It’s now so much faster when searching your contacts. It actually starts displaying results as you’re typing the names in the search box in real-time, which is cool. Opening the contact record is also faster, without no delay after double-clicking on a contact.

The other new feature involves categorizing your contacts into groups. Yes, it’s really just another way of creating distribution lists which comes in handy when corresponding with large groups of people at once. You can add your contacts to more than one group and send emails to the group.

Also new is the ability to mark your favorite contacts with a star, which makes them appear on the front page of your address book. All of your top contacts from Gmail automatically get the gold star but you can easily unselect it.

Plaxo has also renamed its social streaming “Pulse” service to “Stream.” All of the same functionality remains, it’s just a new name.

These changes point to a good future for one of the elder statesmen of the Web 2.0 era. Plaxo has listened to its users, improved performance and added some useful features. It’s still the best when it comes to importing contacts from other address books such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. By the way, you might have missed this feature but you can also import all of your LinkedIn contacts. Just perform a LinkedIn address book export and upload it to Plaxo here.

It’s going to be interesting to see what other socially-aware address book services like Gist and Soocial will do in this space. I think it’s surprising to see that Google still hasn’t done much with Gmail’s address book; I want contact information synchronization and other social networking features to get added, but nothing much has changed. Not yet anyway.

]]>HipChat, a new self-funded startup from the folks who sold web calendar HipCal to Plaxo right out of college in 2006, is launching today an Adobe AIR corporate group chat client.

With a look very similar to 37signals‘ web chat product Campfire, but with some added features such as one-to-one messaging, notification noises and file-sharing support, HipChat is targeting startups as customers — its largest plan maxes out at 100 people.

There are already lots of products filling this need for casual and convenient corporate communications — for instance, Socialcast (which, like us, is funded by True Ventures, where Om Malik is a venture partner) and Yammer, or an IRC client. However, in just a 30-day private beta period, HipChat reports it had 500 companies sign up and more than 100,000 messages sent. And some of these users are already paying. So that’s a pretty good sign it’s not superfluous!

However, I think the issue with these tools is that it often isn’t enough to do one thing well in the corporate environment. When your paying customers are asking for more and more features it’ll be hard to avoid being a general collaboration tool.

]]>Xobni, a very useful Microsoft Oulook plug-in that we’ve covered with praise previously, has just released a new update that now reveals more information about your contacts, including acquiring valuable data from their Salesforce account. This has been a much-demanded feature that is available for all Xobni users for free at this time. Ultimately, there will be a small fee for this feature but the return on investment for those organizations that use Outlook and Salesforce will make the decision a no-brainer.

The other new feature that most people might have missed in a previous update (I know I did) is the ability to access each contact’s Twitter account information. This was also a very popular request from Xobni’s userbase who’ve previously been able to access their contacts’ Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Adding Twitter and SalesForce connectivity to your address book makes a great deal of sense.

Here’s an example of what the Xobni panel displays next to your email message. Not only will you see the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses and threaded email conversations, but now you can actually view that contact’s Twitter stream (once you connect the right Twitter account, based on the email address used). Notice how you can actually send a tweet right from Xobni as well as unfollow the contact and view their Twitter profile for even more information.

Personally, I love this hot trend of infusing intelligence into our otherwise under-utilized address books. Services such as Xobni, Gist and the one that started it all, Plaxo, are providing tremendous value by allowing us to get more from our contacts. It’s baffling to me that Google has not done much with contacts in Gmail. Things will become even more interesting when (not if) Google finally adds social networking power to its address book.

]]>The folks at Ribbit Mobile are offering 100 invitations to WebWorkerDaily readers for the beta of their new communication service. Just sign up on the reservations page, and enter the invite code “wwd09″ in the appropriate box.

Ribbit Mobile has more features than Google Voice, and reminds me a bit of VoxOx, which I wrote about a few days ago. This service looks very promising, but, like VoxOx, it isn’t finished yet. I’ve been unable to test it fully, because it doesn’t yet support Sprint cellphones. I also can’t get my contact list to import, either from a CSV file or through Plaxo (the only options Ribbit Mobile supports). I hope to post a fuller review soon.